I agree w/ Lee Ann (although the guitar wasn’t quite on the same beat). Some of the complaints for network access have to do with the filters/firewalls schools are required to have installed.

My biggest frustration with students and technology is how to level the playing field between the haves and have nots. Most of my students can access my moodle page from home, but what about the dozen or so who cannot?

I agree with the video’s sentiments: schools do need to change how they do things. How is it that so many decisions regarding educational content and curriculum are being made by tech services departments and politicians. What could we accomplish if we didn’t have to jump through hoops to make ed tech opportunities happen? The teachers in my school aren’t tech phobic, but they have been burned by blocked web 2.0 tools, inadequate bandwidth, and locked-down hardware. When are education and curriculum decisions going to be made by education professionals? What steps can we take to get there?

Coming from more teachers who don’t wanna teach and want districts to buy them equipment for HOME. Same old mantra. I was NOT happy when my daughter saw the Paris Hilton sex video IN school. AND it was a filtered environment. What will they view without filtering? Not a whole lot of education going on. Just spell out EXACTLY what you want to do “technically” that you can not. Be precise.

All my teachers have the password to get through our school firewall, I just keylogged my own computer, and acted like I could not get a report word doc off a sharing service that was blocked, and casually asked a teacher to put in the password. Then I anonymously handed it out all over school. 🙂

I like this viedo, but I don’t agree with the first scenario. I am a laptop user, and I have made the mistake of only having digital copies of my notes and showing up to a test. But if I was allowed to use my laptop, you can bet your @ss I would look up almost every answer online, which would be unfair to all of the other students in the class who don’t have laptops (all 3 of them).

My wife and I took our son out of school eight years ago and a major reason for that was because, figuratively speaking, his school was taking an hour to teach him what he could learn for himself in five minutes at home on the internet. If anything, schools have fallen even further behind the development of education in the world at large. In 2010, both adults and children are learning tons of stuff without school or teachers and without even realising that that’s what they’re doing because it’s embedded into their everyday lives. Perhaps the guys who made the video haven’t noticed that. Education has moved online and all around. You can even carry it with you in your pocket now. No classroom required. If you need a teacher you can Google for options and choose the one who makes the best online videos. It’s all there.

Just a thought from my personal experience, on watching this video of children squandering their valuable lives hoping hoping hoping that the designated adults will catch up with THEM. How bizarre does that seem to me when I’m sitting here at my laptop with a cup of tea and a jammy dodger delighting in the education that’s flooding into my experience 24/7/365?

Education scientist Sugata Mitra tackles one of the greatest problems of education — the best teachers and schools don’t exist where they’re needed most. In a series of real-life experiments from New Delhi to South Africa to Italy, he gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize how we think about teaching.